In 2010, the parents of a Texas high school student told an Air Force officer they were concerned a recruiter was sending their daughter inappropriate text messages, showing up at her work and spreading rumors.

The officer listened to the complaint, but it went no further — a common practice for popular soldiers, according to a senior Defense Department official with knowledge of the case.

This time investigators dug in, eventually speaking with more than a dozen young women, some who met Rodriguez after the first complaint, who said his behavior ranged from unwanted advances to rape. Rodriguez began serving a 27-year military prison sentence in June on a slew of sex crimes, the worst of which was aggravated sexual assault.

The case is just one example of what the Pentagon’s own reports have concluded on sex crimes in the ranks: More than 90 percent of them are committed by predators who strike repeatedly, using positions of power, a weak reporting system and the culture of moving service members and officers from base to base every two or three years where they can prey on victims, over and over again.

At the same time, the Pentagon, renowned for keeping statistics on troop movements across the globe, has repeatedly failed over the past 25-plus years to track these bad actors, leaving sexual predators free to move about with little way for their higher-ups to see their history.

Even the Air Force acknowledges the leadership team overseeing Rodriguez had no record of the 2010 complaint.

The Pentagon still says it’s complied with each requirement Congress has put in place to address sexual assault in its ranks, and any delays are just the result of the normal process of handling records and working out bugs in its systems. In recent months, the Defense Department has even taken some proactive steps such as launching new training programs and reviewing thousands of personnel records. But a look at the history tells a different story: of a massive bureaucracy flouting Congress’s wishes at every turn — even as recently as today, when a database mandated in a 2008 law still sits unfinished, despite the Pentagon spending nearly $14 million to put it in place.

“They do all these reports all the time about how they’re taking care of it. And believe me, no one is more impressive than the United States military when they march in and say, ‘They’re taking care of it. We’re in charge. We’re going to make it happen.’ And then the next year it happens again. So it’s just a recurring problem,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO.

Congress is now confronting the Pentagon more aggressively than it ever has, considering measures as varied as New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposal that removes the chain of command from prosecuting sexual assault cases to Sen. Claire McCaskill’s push for another new database that compiles all accusations included in confidential victim reports.

“I think this is something that is just common sense in the civilian world, and I was shocked it was something that hadn’t even been contemplated in the military system,” said McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.

But it’s unclear if this latest effort will crack the Pentagon’s hierarchy, which has withstood embarrassing scandal after embarrassing scandal, at least eight defense secretaries and four presidents.

Just look at how the Pentagon has responded to calls from Congress to track cases and bad actors. It’s routinely blown past deadlines — by years and decades — to set up two critical databases.

The first calls for an exhaustive criminal database extend back to the late-1980s, when Congress passed a law ordering every agency from the Pentagon to the National Parks Service to start reporting crime stats to the Justice Department. The Defense Department promised to have its system up and running by 2005, but it just finished in 2012.

Then in 2008 Congress told the Pentagon to specifically start tracking sexual assault cases, giving officials two years to get the job done. But five years later, it is still not complete.

“You’ve got perpetrators moving. You’ve got victims moving,” said the DoD official with knowledge of the Rodriguez case. “If you’ve got a perpetrator at a base, his victim pool is ever changing.”

Even senior Pentagon officials have acknowledged their shortcomings, arguing it’s the byproduct of four branches not speaking the same language and privacy laws that present challenges when sharing the names of victims and service members accused of crimes but not convicted.

“We know we need a better system,” Kaye Whitley, then the director of the Pentagon’s lead sexual assault office, told a congressional panel during a 2008 House hearing at which both Democratic and GOP lawmakers expressed frustration with the department for its long delays in better tracking sexual assault crimes.

In the five years since that hearing, the Defense Department has spent about $13.9 million on the Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database, which Congress says needs to track such basic information as “the nature of the assault, the victim, the offender and the outcome of any legal proceedings in connection with the assault.” But it’s still not ready. The latest estimate for all systems go: Oct. 1.

The Army is the culprit for the most recent delay, according to the Government Accountability Office, which has been tracking the Pentagon’s sexual assault work since 2008. “DoD is not there yet with the database, but they are closer than we have ever seen them,” said Brenda Farrell, who runs the program monitoring the defense efforts.

Nate Galbreath, a senior executive adviser in the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, also said the database is tardy because of “evolving reporting requirements that we have to keep working in.”

“This year is our shakedown, and we’re all just trying to keep track of what’s in there and what’s supposed to be in there,” he said. “Anytime you deploy something, you’ve got to work the bugs out, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Lawmakers and victim groups said the delays have had real consequences, since the system is supposed to give the Pentagon the ability to do things like name the bases with the highest and lowest rates for sexual assault. That can be useful data for sharing across branches and locations which practices are working well — and which aren’t.

Maloney, the New York Democrat who is one of the leading advocates for the crime database, wrote to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last year to complain about the delays.

“In fact, I believe you were in Congress and voted to enact the very law that created this reporting requirement,” she wrote in the months before the system went live.

But Defense officials say that their criminal investigations aren’t dependent on either of the databases, which don’t even have a search function capable of typing in a suspect’s name. Instead, they often turn first to 45 years of files located in the Defense Central Index of Investigations, an earlier iteration of which was dinged in a Defense Department Inspector General report in 2001 for having 1.4 million incomplete files.

Investigators also often question friends, colleagues, spouses and former girlfriends for details about any prior incidents. “That’s typically where we get it, doing the grunt work, talking to someone who knows something,” said the military official who works on sexual assault issues.

But it’s not just the delayed databases that are the problem. There are many reasons for the Pentagon’s shortcomings.

Critics say the justice system allows assailants to routinely plea-bargain down to less serious crimes, which makes for misleading data.

Nancy Parrish, president of Protect Our Defenders, a victim advocacy group, expects the Pentagon’s new sexual assault database will very likely fall short by tracking only offenders convicted in military courts. There were only 238 people who fell into that category in fiscal 2012.

“So it is likely to be pretty small,” she said, adding that perpetrators often end up convicted of something less serious than rape or sexual assault, such as a collateral offense like fraternization.

In some cases, alleged military perpetrators walk free. Here, Parrish cited the case of Jeremy Goulet, a former Army helicopter pilot in Hawaii who was accused of raping two women but negotiated a plea deal to drop the charges and accept a less-than-honorable discharge. Earlier this year, Goulet allegedly shot and killed two Santa Cruz police detectives seeking to question him about a sexual assault report at the coffee shop where he’d worked. The 35-year-old, also killed in the incident, had a criminal history after serving in the Army that included spending two years in an Oregon prison stemming from a concealed-weapon conviction and a peeping Tom incident.